Consider how to display these results in an easily understandable visual featuring before-and-after data. Examples of results include the following.
• Reading comprehension
• Writing proficiency
• Mathematics proficiency
• Attendance
• Parental engagement
• Consistency of scoring
• Student engagement
The six steps are a process of identification, measurement, delegation, and elimination that makes way for aligning focus on the greatest priorities of the system.
Part 1 closes with a description of the six steps in action. The appendix contains a template to aid in creating your 100-day plan (see page 126).
Part 2: Creating the Environment for Success
In part 2, we consider the environment for success for 100-day leaders and the educational systems they guide. The primary organizing structure for effective educational systems is the PLC. Consisting of collaborative teams that focus on core questions for student results, PLCs allow all people within the system—teachers, paraprofessionals, students, parents, leaders, and community members—to understand how they can personally support the system’s goals. The Collaborative Team Rubric in the appendix (see page 128) provides scales for use in assessing PLC practice within teams.
Putting It All Together
We conclude this book with a focus on accountability and resilience. There are times when leaders must, in our vernacular, “put their stars on the table.” That expression stems from the occasions in which military generals must honor their principles and values above the political demands of the moment. By relinquishing their stars, they express a willingness to lose their authority, position, and professional security in order to establish the primacy of integrity over obedience. We believe that the heavy emphasis on test-based accountability in the first two decades of the 21st century has amounted to an exercise in frustration. While student scores are certainly important, those scores tell only a fraction of the story of teachers’, administrators’, and students’ hard work. Our view of accountability, framed by the work of Richard DuFour, Douglas Reeves, and Rebecca DuFour (2018), is holistic and includes not only what students produce in terms of literacy, mathematics, and other scores but also what causes those scores. We therefore consider the accountability variables that teachers and leaders can control—the measurable and specific actions in the classroom, school, and district that lead to the results teachers and leaders seek to achieve.
Resilience refers to how 100-day leaders persevere in the face of overwhelming obstacles. Some change literature has claimed that systemic change occurs only after five to seven years (Fullan, 2011; Kotter, 1996). Imagine that you are the parent of a kindergarten student and you hear that effective change in literacy instruction will happen when your child enters middle school. An anonymous friend of ours has said that school change happens “one funeral at a time.” We are unwilling to accept this cynical view, and therefore claim that history and experience show that change can happen much faster—in one hundred days.
If you don’t believe us, believe Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt. As you shall see, educational leaders around the world have proven that 100-day leaders can make a remarkable and enduring difference in a very short time.
PART 1
EXPLORING 100-DAY LEADERSHIP
CHAPTER 1
WHY BEFORE HOW: THE MORAL IMPERATIVE OF LEADERSHIP
ABRAHAM LINCOLN IS credited with saving the Union and emancipating the slaves. But as any student of history knows, achieving these goals came at an enormous cost in blood and treasure, and success was not at all certain during the dark days of the early 1860s. Although the Emancipation Proclamation is, in retrospect, regarded as a great victory for the advancement of equality and the pursuit of the Declaration of Independence’s noble goal that “all men are created equal,” even the Northern states did not have consensus on this when the Proclamation was announced. Lincoln faced opposition in his cabinet, in Congress, among many governors in states that had not joined the Confederacy, and, most notably, among the generals leading the Union army.
Presidential scholar and historian Doris Kearns Goodwin (2018) notes that before Ulysses S. Grant secured the surrender of Robert E. Lee at Appomattox Court House, the Union suffered a series of disastrous military leaders, including George McClellan, who regarded emancipation as an abomination and who warned that Northern troops would desert in droves if slavery were abolished. These soldiers, he claimed, fought for the Union, not for the enslaved. McClellan’s failure to pursue Southern armies more vigorously, Goodwin (2018) notes, nearly cost the Union the war. In brief, Lincoln did not wait for buy-in from politicians and generals, but followed the moral authority that he perceived as an unalterable course. He acted on not what was popular but what was right and just. In his address to Congress on the issue, he said:
Fellow-citizens, we cannot escape history.… The fiery trial through which we pass, will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation.… In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free—honorable alike in what we give and what we preserve. We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth. (Goodwin, 2018, pp. 241–242)
Goodwin (2018) concludes, “It was through the language of his leadership that a moral purpose and meaning was imprinted upon the protracted misery of the Civil War” (p. 242). Lincoln exercised transformational leadership at its best—leadership in pursuit of a moral purpose, not political gain or popularity (Goodwin, 2018).
Moral Authority in Education
In education, leadership based on moral authority is the key to sustaining educational results and organizational health. The title and administrative authority of a leadership role pales in comparison with moral authority, which no title can bestow. Titles are designated; moral authority is earned. This requires leaders who have the will and the courage to lead—to act, and then to persist in the face of adversity and opposition. Whether the leader is a veteran or new to the position, every few months bring new opportunities for beginnings. Every day people get to choose. Hopefully, they will choose to focus on the ultimate moral purpose of schooling—enhancing student learning. The most complex and challenging multiyear objectives, such as building systemwide capacity for technology integration, planning and executing building projects, or overhauling special education services, all begin with moral purpose. Access to technology is an equity issue, bridging the opportunity gap between rich and poor. Planning and executing building projects is not about bricks and mortar, but about providing access and equity for students and creating the most effective educational environment for all students. Architects, masons, welders, bricklayers, plumbers, and carpenters all engage in a school building project with a moral purpose at their core. They are not merely assembling a building, they are creating a learning environment. All of their efforts, ultimately, will have a direct or indirect impact on the quality of education that occurs within a district or school. Their moral purpose today is similar to the craftsmen of medieval times when they were not merely laying bricks, but building a cathedral. Improving special education delivery, whether it involves extending services to students who need them or removing the special education label from wrongly identified students, is an equity
